Professors Melissa Harris-Perry and Jelani Cobb discuss current events on Facebook

On Friday afternoon, ELLE magazine editor-at-large Melissa Harris-Perry and Jelani Cobb, writer for The New Yorker, sat down to discuss a number of topics on Facebook Live, including the Dallas shootings and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Apparently, it was kind of a situation where, until the shooting began, there were images on social media with officers taking pictures with protestors,” Harris-Perry said. “Dallas has an African-American police chief. There seems to be some relative goodwill in the city … We’re starting to get some of the stories of the men who were lost [in the shooting]. These are going to be stories that carry enormous weight in shifting everything that we are currently talking about in terms of the notion of the vulnerability of black lives relative to over-policing.”

“One of the things that we’ve already done, just in looking at the early dialogue around this, is that this has become a Black Lives Matter conversation,” Cobb added. “I think this has to be a mass shooting conversation. We’ve had this dialogue a number of times — after Orlando, after Aurora, [Colorado], after Newtown, [Connecticut] — we could just list the number of times that we’ve had this. And if we live in a society in which we know mass shootings happen with some degree of frequency, is it inconceivable that someone would target police?”

Watch the full interview below.

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